How to remove a space between two characters or strings in notepad++

Question

Consider I have a string in quotations "( the" which occures in a huge body of text.

I want to remove the space between non-alphanumeric ( and aplphanumeric t characters

Answer 1

Replace match of regular expression pattern (?<=\()\s+(?=t) with empty string.

If any alphanumeric character may occur after such space, then use pattern (?<=\()\s+(?=[^\W_])

Answer 2

Per this answer if you are using version 6.0 or later you can use Perl compatible regular expressions. So you could do the following regex search and replace.

replace (\W) (\w) with \1\2
replace (\w) (\W) with \1\2

This will remove the space between any non-alphanumeric and alphnumeric characters first, then the reverse (alnum, space, non-alnum).